Allistair Covell’s vibrantly colourful and abstract compositions are the visual interpretations of people, places and memories; heavily inspired and influenced by his synaesthesic responses to music.
Synaesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon and Covell’s synaesthesia, specifically chromesthesia, enables him to perceive music as energetic forms and colours, resulting in his artworks becoming physical illustrations of sound on a surface.
Covell regards musics to be as important as the chosen medium he works with, using the listening experience to drive the artwork forward. Musical instruments, song melodies, voices and vocals are depicted as rhythmic and gestural brush marks, drawn photisms, layered shapes and complex shifting patterns.
Covell’s practice encompasses paintings on canvas, digital animated videos, small sculptural forms and an ongoing series of hand-knotted carpets, made in collaboration with weavers in Afghanistan and Nepal.
In 2014 Covell won the AfghanMade Best Young Designer Award at the 9th Carpet Design Awards at Domotex Hannover in Germany. Driven by a fascination for the heritage and traditional techniques involved in making carpets, Covell began to work with specialist artisan weavers.
Covell has worked with a number of international organisations, companies and initiatives including AfghanMade, Rug-Maker, Turquoise Mountain, Craig & Rose Paints and Think Positive Prints UK alongside working on projects with organisations including Campaign for Wool, HALI London, Arts Thread, the Letchworth Heritage Foundation and the colour consultancy agency Calzada Fox with The London Design Fair.
Covell’s work has featured in leading publications, newspapers and magazines including: COVER, The Financial Time’s ‘How To Spend It’, GQ, Evening Standard, Elle Decoration, Selvedge, Home & Country, The Telegraph and ArtCarpet.
Covell is a graduate of the University of the Arts London and the University of Bedfordshire and has a BA (Hons) in Surface Design and an FdA in Fashion & Textile Design.
From 2014 – 2019 Covell was awarded a studio Fellowship with the Digswell Arts Trust and granted a studio, initially in Stevenage and later in Letchworth Garden City. Upon completing his Fellowship, Covell was invited by the Directors board to become a Trustee.
From 2017 to 2020, Covell was an elected member of Design-Nation, the premium portfolio for Craft, Design and Product in the UK and in September 2017 exhibited Covell’s carpet artworks at Decorex International as part of a Desig-Nation showcase event.
solo exhibition – Canvas to carpet
Allistair Covell: Canvas To Carpet (8 Feb – 5 May 2019) at the Broadway Gallery in Letchworth Garden City was the first major solo exhibition of Covell’s work in the UK. The exhibition, commissioned and curated by Laura Dennis, served as a survey of Covell’s creative practice over a period of five years and encompassed painting, video art and sculpture.
The centrepiece of the exhibition was a series of hand-knotted carpets, woven interpretations of Covell’s own abstract paintings and drawings; themselves inspired by his Synaesthetic responses to music and sound.
“The Broadway Gallery is very excited to announce that it will host Allistair’s first major solo exhibition in Spring 2019, focusing on his creative journey from ‘the canvas to the carpet’. Visitors to the exhibition will be able to experience the carpets up close; adorning the walls of the gallery in a celebration of them as objets d’art and learning about the techniques involved in their production. Each carpet in the exhibition, much like Allistair’s original paintings also on display, varies in style and composition. Whilst some carpets have a strong ‘painterly’ appearance, others have a distinct bold and brightly coloured ‘Pop Art’ aesthetic, based on Allistair’s playful plasticine sculptures and his vibrant iPad sketches. One carpet perfectly resembles its ink-pen drawing counterpart, owing to the carpet’s high-knot count, and is more monotone in pattern – a dramatic departure from Allistair’s traditional kaleidoscopic clashing colour palette.”
Curator Laura Dennis, Broadway Gallery, Letchworth Garden City, November 2018
The carpets on display or ‘woven paintings’, a term Dennis used to describe them, were handcrafted by Turquoise Mountain in Afghanistan and by Rug Maker in Nepal to the artist’s designs. The exhibition showcased how the weavers masterfully interpreted Covell’s rhythmic energy and spontaneous artistic style, re-creating every expressive brush stroke, splash of colour and hand-drawn shape into a woven knot.
In the second were two short films illustrating the carpet making techniques of both countries. Rug Maker’s Meet The Makers and Turquoise Mountain’s Carpet Making In Afghanistan, showcased each region’s varying traditions and production methods, with some techniques remaining unchanged for centuries. The room also included early paintings and two vitrines, showing carpet samples, sketchbooks and a series of mini plasticine sculptural experiments.
University of hertfordshire art collection
In 2020, Covell’s iPad digital animation film To The Beat was selected for the inaugural UH ARTS Hertfordshire Open 2020 exhibition at St Albans Museum & Art Gallery. In early 2021, Covell’s animation film was acquired by UH ARTS + CULTURE, becoming part of their permanent art collection and the first video artwork in their collection.
In 2022, UH ARTS + CULTURE made a second acquisition of Covell’s work with Jane’s Dream (2018), a hand-knotted Afghan carpet, created in collaboration with Turquoise Mountain. Since October 2023 Jane’s Dream has been on public display in the new Dean’s Gallery, Art & Design Building, University of Hertfordshire.
Allistair Covell 